Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century

Design Thinking

April 07, 2014

Knowledge is, undoubtedly, extremely important. Indeed it is only through knowing things that we can make connections and develop our own understanding. After all, learning is fundamentally about making connections between elements of knowledge. It is nothing new to note that there has been a pradigm shift in ease of access to information and that so much of the world's knowledge is now Googleable. I was struck by the excellent video that Chris Betcher made on Google voice search (below), not only from an assistive technlogies perspective, but also from the perspective of how easy it was to access such a vast array of information instantaneously.

Interestingly, this incredible technology really goes to show how much we need to work with kids on finding and exploringungoogleable questions. Thanks to Google's mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" we have knowledge at our fingertips, or more precisely on the tip of our tongue thanks to Google Voice Search. The role of education must be to help kids evaluate, hypothesise, create and apply their knowledge, ask and attempt to answer questions with ethical shades of meaning, look at the world around them and ask why, how and what can I do about it. Knowledge is no longer the currency in education, it is much more about the mindset, skillset and toolset needed at any given time to learn successfully and more importantly to create the world around us. So how are we doing this as educators? Discuss...

January 30, 2013

What an awesome title for a conference! A conference on thinking. But we think all of the time so why do we need to confer on it? Because we can think better and we can help our kids to think better. As the legendary (but sans hats) Edward de Bono said at the conference - things can be ebne (excellent, but not enough). What a neologism to live by, things are excellent, but not enough.

Anyway, enough rambling... I was lucky enough to attend this conference with two amazing colleagues from John Monash Science School, who are pushing the boundaries of mathematics education, Diane Farrell (@fardef) and Kim McGillivray (@kimberlyannmac) (follow them on twitter, I don't care if it is Friday or any other day of the week - ones to watch I telll you...)

From the masterclass with the legend of SOLO taxonomy, Pam Hook throught the inspiring keynotes, in particular from Ewan McINtosh, I was forced to think, evaluate, analyse, unpick, deliberate, rebuild and, in the words of Alvin Toffler (paraphrased) "learn, unlearn and relearn". I have no intention to describe in detail the workshops and conferences as I have recorded them in a public evernote notebook here.

Needless to say that I learned a ton, unlearned a great deal and relearned one thing - learning is not done by the teacher, but by the thinkng, reflective learner.

I also had a a massive fanboy moment with one of my edu heroines, Pam Hook...

October 14, 2012

Over the past year, I have been synthesising my 5 years experience of teaching the ALITE Learn2Learn course, with my experience of Design Thinking, with the fantastic project my Y12 group did with the International Telecoms Union, brokered through NoTosh and UNESCO's Four Pillars of Education into a course for year 10 called "Learn to..."

Now we are coming to the end of the school year and I am launching the "Learn To...Design Think" project with y10 (the only downside, and my learning for next year, is that with exams, course confirmation and orientation weeks the kids have a lot less time than I imagined to do this project :()

Using a realsmart rafl to collect evidence of skills, attributes and learning tasks will allow us to capture what I hope will be a powerful learning experience.

We are starting off with two videos about first world problems and then setting off on our challenge. I hope the videos below exemplify what we are hoping to achieve!